arXiv:2608.20379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in large language models (LLMs) have fueled a wave of research into agency: the ability to reason, plan, and act. This effort has produced agentic frameworks that orchestrate perception, memory, and decision-making around powerful LLM backbones. With the advent of large multimodal models (LMMs), these systems can process and integrate diverse modalities, including images, audio, and video, thereby improving their real-world applicability. Yet, while surveys of LLM-based agents exist, the role of multimodality in shaping agency has not been systematically examined in recent years. This survey fills the gap by analyzing the impact of multimodality across the core functional modules of the agentic framework: perception, reasoning, planning, memory, and action. Using this lens, we trace the evolution from text-centric agents to multimodal frameworks, examine how modalities are integrated through delegated, late-fusion, and early-fusi...
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